Hoen, Cornelius Hendrickz (d. 1523/24)

Cornelius Hendrickz Hoen,died before April 1524 and lived at Delft, Dutch province of South Holland, was a lawyer of the Court of Holland at The Hague. At Delft Hoen heard the preaching of a Dominican monk Wouter, known as "the Lutheran monk," who "gave him the sense of truth." This may have happened about 1510, though it is more likely that Hoen became averse to Roman Catholicism shortly after 1517. Reading the writings of Erasmus, Gansfort, and Luther, he more and more rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, no longer believing that the real flesh and blood of Christ were present in the host. Hoen exposed his new views in Epistola Christiana, in which he wrote that communion should not be a sacrament in the Catholic sense, but merely a commemoration of the death of Christ; the bread should be understood as a symbol. The word "is" in Christ's words "this is my body" has not the sense of "this really is," but "this means," as when Christ says, "I am the vine." This letter by Hoen was brought to Luther by Hinne Rode in 1521, but Luther rejected Hoen's symbolical conception, because he wished to maintain the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. Two years later, in January 1523, Rode visited Oecolampad in Basel, who read the letter with much interest and advised Rode to travel to Zürich and present the letter to Zwingli. Zwingli, whose doctrine of the communion at this time was still somewhat uncertain, was very receptive to Hoen's views. "In this letter," he writes, "I found a pearl of great value; is has the sense of means." Zwingli soon adopted Hoen's views, which in this way also became the Anabaptist concept. In the meantime Hoen was arrested (February 1523) for heresy. Before he came to trial he died.

Hoen's Epistola Christiana was published by Zwingli in 1525 and re-edited by W. Eekhof at The Hague in 1917.